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Big house on the Prairie: Calgary's most expensive home

Built in 2000, this $19.7-million mansion reportedly features 14 bathrooms, elevators, indoor pool, sauna, gym and a theatre (Google Street View)

Part three of a five-part series on the priciest digs in Canada, and who lives in them. See Vancouver's most expensive home here and Toronto's here.

It would be almost unseemly for Calgary’s priciest house to be owned by someone other than an oil industry tycoon. Okay, maybe a hockey player would make sense as well.

Fortunately, Alfred Balm’s $19.7 million mansion at 27 Pump Hill Close in the city’s southwest fits the bill.

The 91-room manor isn’t in Calgary’s priciest neighbourhood. Brittania, perched high above the Elbow River with a view of downtown, wins that prize.

Instead, the 15-year-old house sits among the mansions on tiny Pump Hill Close, fronting more than 250 feet of the street, enough to require three separate driveway gates, private tennis court obscured by trees.

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As mansions go, it may not be the pound-for-pound winner, but it’s got the size.

“It’s a very large house on a very big lot,” says Re/Max agent Gary Cronin, who’s sold a few houses in the neighbourhood.

The house was recently assessed as the city’s priciest, with a lofty value for a city that doesn’t stand out as a destination for the super-rich, unless they happen to have built their wealth in one particular industry.

Dutch-born Balm has lived in Europe for much of his life, but has been a big player in Calgary since founding Fracmaster in the 1980s, building it up to become a top wellhead company in Canada and at one point the largest oilfield services company in Russia.

He currently is chairman and owner of Emergo Group, a holding company (based in tax-friendly Cyprus) with corporations across several industries.

As a private-company owner, his net worth is tough to track down, and Forbes doesn’t have a recent entry on him. He’s been described as a billionaire in the past, and even if that’s not true anymore, anyone who owns a holding company that owns several smaller companies across multiple industries can afford to buy any Canadian patch of dirt they want.

As a corporate globetrotter, it’s unclear how much time Balm actually spends at the house, but there is certainly a lot of space to use, or leave unused.

Built in 2000, the house dwarfs other houses in a mansion neighbourhood, and reportedly features 14 bathrooms, a couple of elevators, indoor pool, sauna, gym and a theatre. With more than 15,000 square feet to play with, there’s room for all of it.

The multi-acre grounds are roomy, leafy, and feature the afore-mentioned tennis court.

From the front, though, the curb appeal is up for debate. The house has a decidedly suburban look, with cream-coloured exterior walls, taupe finishes and an excess of pillars. An uncharitable comparison would be a high-end strip mall. Glass-half-full, it’s just a McMansion where the contractors forgot to stop.

The $19.6 million value puts it head-and-shoulders above the second-highest value property, an $11.2 million home on Aspen Ridge Heights. But these price tags perhaps need to be taken with a grain of salt in a real estate market that doesn’t quite have the high-end liquidity of Toronto or Vancouver.

And when we’re talking oil town and oil prices are in the gutter, the supply-and-demand scales tend to lean towards the former.

“At the luxury end. The rich guys are still rich, but they put their chequebook in their pocket when things go bad,” says Cronin.

“It would be a very unique buyers who would pay $20 million for a house in that neighbourhood.”

So if Balm, currently in his late 70s, wants ever wants to sell, he may need to leave the place on the market for a while. Happily, he can probably afford to take a loss on the sale.